Oppenheimer

“He’s dancing between the raindrops” - Cillian Murphy, regarding Oppenheimer (2023)

These words, although not spoken in the film, are the tenet of what defines Nolan’s newest project. In his biopic on the “father of the nuclear bomb”. Christopher Nolan, the director ubiquitous for his grandiose and overly ambitious projects, begins Oppenheimer with a similar level of wide-eyed resplendence. Though most filmmakers would fail to sustain this level of excitement throughout its three-hour runtime, Nolan, fully cognizant of audience expectations, expertly juggles and interweaves three narratives simultaneously. His mastery of this harkens back to his similarly confounding and equally experimental sophomoric film, Memento. In many ways, Oppenheimer is a tapestry of pure juxtaposition, fuelled by this one question: What happens when good intentions lead to irrevocable destruction?

Nolan’s Oppenheimer begins at a hearing, with a lens pressed squarely at J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as he recounts the decades of pain he has suffered on his moral conscience as a result of his creation. Artfully transitioning through time, we see three narratives unfold: the events that inevitably led to that fateful atomic bomb, the difficult questions asked years later to Oppenheimer and those who knew him to evaluate his character, and Dr. Lewis Strauss’s (Robert Downey Jr.) Senate confirmation hearing. Despite these all taking place at different points in time, Nolan thrives on the film’s uniquely baffling structure. Under the commentary track for his feature-length debut, Following, Nolan expressed how “the structure lends itself to immediate confusion, which I like, [...forcing] the audience to think and changes the status of what is happening on-screen.” Indeed, Oppenheimer’s contents need not surprise anyone who is even remotely knowledgeable about Nolan’s stylistic tendencies as it wistfully contemplates on the ethics of the weapons of mass destruction.

Christopher Nolan has always been interested in artists who are bounded by moral complexity, whose throughline begins at The Prestige. Born Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the man who is now synonymous with the infamous phrase “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”, Cillian Murphy’s sprightly interpretation of the man in his early years is intertwined with the soulless, dispirited figure in the film’s chronologically abrasive approach to the biopic. The similarities to Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is endless, not least because of both’s naively optimistic (and opportunistic) approach to creation that led to abusive destruction. But for how straightforward and facile Miyazaki’s opus was, Nolan questions the viewer too: where do the lines get drawn regarding the culpability one faces in the creative process?

Nolan’s achievement does not come merely from its creative structural cohesion, but from how he parallels the act of creativity with that of Oppenheimer’s revolutionary creation. Nolan is a cinematic and creative force in the current zeitgeist — a quick search online yields thousands of think-pieces all echoing the same few questions regarding Nolan’s credibility and artistic intent as a filmmaker. It’s no wonder why Nolan was so quickly drawn into the neuroses of Oppenheimer, a person, no less, who struggled with balancing on the precipices between the clinical rigor of science and the moral ambiguity of emotion. There is no one who could have made Oppenheimer besides Nolan, precisely because of their lack of moral obligation regarding their social impact. 

There is plenty to lament about regarding Nolan’s indulgent work — which stands out as his longest work by far — but the beauty lies in how similarly it mirrors the struggles of its protagonist. Oppenheimer isn’t perfect because Oppenheimer is not perfect. It mirrors the complications of ethical decisions in its equally divisive and confusing juxtaposition of artistic responsibility. There is nobody who is making films like Nolan, good or bad, and being able to appreciate that cinematic singularity is key to basking in the film’s glorious grandeur.

10/10